Dibyajyoti Sarma's Blog, page 5
July 15, 2022
Sucharita Dutta-Asane reviews After Grief by Shikhandin ...
Sucharita Dutta-Asane reviews After Grief by Shikhandin in The Bangalore Review/
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The journey, though, is demanding – it requires the mind to cull and remember moments that one would rather push under the carpet, banish into hidden, dark corners. Some of the most difficult poems in terms of this movement belong to Parts IV and V of the book. These are intimate poems, poems of struggle, images segueing from one difficult, deepening emotion into another, groping to understand what was, emotions recollected as well as lived, and thus, more layered in trying to understand the mother-daughter relationship as well as the traces it has left behind. These poems are complex in their emotional weave, tangling and disentangling the skeins of the desire for affection and finding in its place the memory of its absence. Here, the poems are connected by memory and its “bones”, imagination fills the spaces of a child’s remembered yearning for her mother’s affection, the adult’s bitter recalling of what was not, followed by the slow laying-to-rest, the word-images shifting from poem to poem, from “rage-cindered… quartz”, to “the fist that slammed out through your vagina” to “My forehead burnt with the history we are counselled to forget” to, finally, “tides on a shore./ Nothing less nothing more” (pp 48-59).
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Read the complete review here. https://bangalorereview.com/2022/07/f...
July 9, 2022
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Man...
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Manindra Gupta’s Pebblemonkey, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha Published by Jadavpur University Press; printed at Hyam Enterprise
July 2, 2022
Manish Sain reviews Arjavam by Geetha Ravichandran in Fi...
Manish Sain reviews Arjavam by Geetha Ravichandran in Firstpost.
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Sprinkled with personal elements and memories of Ravichandran, Arjavam touches one with a sense of belonging that would connect with almost every Indian reader. It almost feels written for every individual reader, a sense of coming home to familiar smells, people and memories of those people cannot be missed in Ravichandran’s poetry.
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Read the complete review here. https://www.firstpost.com/art-and-cul...
Mustansir Dalvi reviews Speak, Woman! by Smita Agarwal i...
Mustansir Dalvi reviews Speak, Woman! by Smita Agarwal in The Wire.
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In Speak, Woman!, author Smita Agarwal speaks of a woman’s condition, and exhorts others to do so too. She knows that there is little recourse to equity, even solidarity, from the state, its institutions, its cultural constructs, or from those of the opposite persuasion.
So she raises her voice in this asymmetrical world. “They are done with decency,” she says, speaking on behalf of those like herself in her poem, ‘Self Goal’. Through her courageous words, she chargesheets the patriarchy while simultaneously exploring herself. Both are undertaken with a candour that makes this book of poems so riveting.
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Read the complete review here. https://thewire.in/books/smita-agarwa...
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PS: As a publisher, we are especially thankful to Mr Dalvi for pointing out the design mistakes. We agree with Mr Dalvi that "A book of poems is a peculiar animal", and we tried our best to do justice to the book, as we do with all our titles. Now we realise that the design may not have worked for this particular title, and we thank Mr Dalvi for letting us know. We will try to bring out a second edition as a "slightly larger-sized book, with a fine cover and clear, uncluttered pages of verse".
June 15, 2022
Our poet Basudhara Roy (Stitching a Home) has a new book,...
Our poet Basudhara Roy (Stitching a Home) has a new book, Inhabiting, from Authorspress, which, the poet says, is the spiritual sequel to Stitching a Home — where the poet considers the questions of space, identity and self-hood in a series of poems that reveals the poets growing command over the craft of poetry.
A must-read, and highly recommended.
Get the book here. https://www.amazon.in/Inhabiting-Poem...
We are excited to announce that our poets Gayatri Majumda...
We are excited to announce that our poets Gayatri Majumdar (I KNOW YOU ARE HERE), Sekhar Banerjee (The Fern-Gatherer’s Association), along with Gopal Lahiri, have edited a new poetry anthology, Home, published by Brown Critique, featuring 50 seasoned and young poets from across India and abroad. Home can be a concept, or an actual physical space, which we were forced to reconsider for over the past couple of years during the recent pandemic. In this extraordinary anthology, the poets share their unique perspective and flavour. A must-read, and highly recommended.
Get the book here. https://www.amazon.in/Critique-Anthol...
June 12, 2022
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Pra...
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Prashant Bagad’s Marathi novel, NavalPublished by Papyrus Prakashan, Kalyan; printed at Yash Printographics, Noida
June 5, 2022
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Ram...
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom
Published by Allen Lane (Penguin Random House); printed at Thomson Press
May 21, 2022
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Rem...
The book this week recommended by Dibyajyoti Sarma is Remo: The Autobiography of Remo Fernandes
Published by HarperCollins Publishers, cover design by Gavin Morris; typeset in Arno Pro at Manipal Technologies; printed at Replika Press
May 19, 2022
Some years back I had uploaded a couple of my short stor...
Some years back I had uploaded a couple of my short stories to the Pratilipi platform. Later, they asked me if I would allow one of the stories to be converted into an audiobook for Pratilipi FM. I, of course, said yes, and forgot all about it. Then, the other day, while looking for some info on digital publishing for a friend, I found the audio version of the story — The Honeymoon Suite — on the site, and to my utter surprise, 37390 people have already seen it.
Here is the link, if you are interested.
